336 



necessarily present in plants in order that they may be useful as 

 articles of diet, may become exceedingly noxious when in excess 

 (Phytol. iv. 318) ; and that this is actually the case, the experience of 

 every day fully confirms. In all the natural orders, there is one plant 

 or one genus of plants, which exhibits the structural characters of the 

 order in greater perfection and in a higher degree of development than 

 the others ; and so, we believe, in all such groups there are plants 

 which possess the peculiar secretions, or properties, of the group in a 

 more highly concentrated degree than the other members of that 

 group. This may be, and probably is, the case, with the seeds of 

 Lolium temulentum, which the author adduces as one example of the 

 dangerous tendency of the doctrine of similar qualities in plants be- 

 longing to the same natural order ; the stimulating principle necessary 

 as a condiment which exists in a slight degree in the seeds of the Gra- 

 minaceae, is in the seeds of Lolium highly concentrated, and conse- 

 quently noxious. We have an example in the sugar-cane of the con- 

 centration of the saccharine principle which pervades, in a greater or 

 less degree, the herbaceous parts of the other grasses, and which ren- 

 ders those parts so grateful and so nutrient to cattle. The silex, 

 again, which all grasses secrete in a greater or less quantity in their 

 stems, is in the stem of the bamboo found in a highly concentrated 

 form, especially at the joints, where it forms the substance called 

 tabasheer ; and other examples will occur to the botanist. The 

 injuries inflicted by other grasses upon man and other animals, are 

 purely mechanical, and are not to be adduced as examples of the 

 noxious qualities of the secretions of those plants. We have said 

 enough to show that the author's objections to the system on this 

 head are equally untenable with those brought against it in other 

 respects. By the way, we may mention that we are entirely unac- 

 quainted with any place " near London," or anywhere else in Eng- 

 land, where Lolium temulentum "is grown in large quantities, probably 

 with the nefarious object of adding to the intoxicating quality of dis- 

 tilled or fermented liquors." — P. 50. What are the excise-people 

 about ? 



At p. 46 the author complains of the " finesse held out on every 

 occasion to the disparagement of the Linnaean botany ;" we are afraid 

 that he has, in more than one instance, laid himself open to the 

 charge of doing the same thing in disparagement of structural botany. 

 For example, at p. 12, by adroitly foisting a parenthetical sentence 

 into a quotation from the Preface to the ' Introduction to Botany,' he 

 makes Dr. Lindley say that the natural system " teaches the physician 



